From Jane Hart, Founder of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies - the largest independent learning site on the Web

30 September 2011

3 simple tips for setting up online communities

On Wednesday I spoke at the World Of Learning 2011 conference in the session on Harnessing the potential of social learning. My message was the same as usual (and you can see my presentation here) that social learning is not about forcing people to participate in online learning communities as part of formal training, but about encouraging and supporting teams to build their own group spaces to support one another more informally in the workflow

Nancy Ouma, from the VSO was on the platform with me and she showed how such social learning approaches had grown organically outside of mandated online courses – in Facebook and LinkedIn. She explained that at first she had been very wary of these groups, but was now so convinced of their value for volunteers, that she wanted to support more initiatives of this kind.

Our message was the same, L&D needs to let go and encourage and support teams to set up their own groups.

After our session, we had a few questions about setting up such communities. The following three questions I think are worth repeating here – as indeed our united response.